Fiction review: 'The First Rule'

Robert CraisThe first rule regarding Robert Crais' crime fiction is that Joe Pike is a more compelling figure than partner Elvis Cole, the glib private investigator who dominated Crais' early novels.

The first rule of the Serbian underworld (I'm taking this on faith, mind you) is, "A thief must forsake his mother, father, brothers and sisters. He must not have a family. . . . We are his family."

When Joe Pike and the Serbs collide in "The First Rule," the first casualty isn't truth: It's the family -- wife, children and nanny -- of Frank Meyer, who dies with them during a home invasion in Westwood, not far from the UCLA campus.

Pike and Meyer were fellow mercenaries, though it has been at least 10 years since they slipped into central Africa to end the Lord's Resistance Army's practice of kidnapping teenage girls and selling them into slavery.

Not surprisingly, then, Pike takes these deaths very personally. When John Chen, an LAPD criminologist, suggests the murders were stupidly arbitrary -- a bunch of losers who "probably hit the wrong house" -- Pike replies, "Yes. They made a mistake."

Driven to avenge his brother-in-arms, Pike soon puzzles out that Meyer was not the primary target of the killers, a trio of D-Block Crips led by Michael Darko, a high-flying Serbian gangster.

Instead, that crew came to Westwood to reclaim Marko's 10-month-old son from the nanny, a 20-year-old named Ana Markovic. She is Darko's sister-in-law and she was sheltering the boy at her sister's request.

Pike is dealing with a guy who doesn't hesitate to slaughter a family -- and a blood relative -- that stands between him and his father-and-son reunion.

Darko, on the other hand, has no idea who he's dealing with.

Crais fans are better informed. Pike is relentless, much smarter than the LA cops at the crime scene, and immune to the messy personal entanglements that weigh down the plots when Elvis is in the building.

Because the second rule of Crais' fiction is that Pike will not be denied, "The First Rule" runs a bloody course to a predictable conclusion. That doesn't diminish the pleasure of watching two skilled craftsmen, Crais and Pike, at work.